It is perhaps better not to speculate on the fate of the former owner of these spectacles, forlornly lying abandoned on Canal Street in Manchester early today… One assumes that the position of the, let’s say, splodge is coincidental. But I guess it might not be.
Who first came up with the concept of a gargoyle, I wonder? Take what is, in essence, a piece of guttering, and wrap a little monster face around it? Someone must have thought of this first, back in antiquity, and the idea caught on. This one graces the fountain in Albert Square, Manchester, and caught the light quite well on this sunny morning.
The defining feature of the day… and the last couple, to be honest…. rain. Persistent, grey, cold. But what the hell, it’s the weekend.
The bees know what we’re doing… and they’re very unhappy.
Or maybe it’s a mural on the side of the New Union. Whatever…
The parking meter waits patiently for custom, all unknowing that it sits just by the very oldest part of this city. Across the road here are the scanty remains of the Roman village of Manucium. Could those guys have foreseen parking meters I wonder? Not to mention digital photography and bloggers. But then again they did build a decent transport system, which is arguably more than we have at the moment.
Decided I’d better put in a photo from Manchester just to prove I do still occasionally show my face there. I know this sign doesn’t mean what it seems to mean, but there’s always something mildly amusing about this idiom. Each generation of kids anew must look around them in trepidation when they pass one.
It was also nice to depict an outdoor scene without a crust of winter over it. Quite a pleasant day in Manchester, in fact.
So I was just walking to work from Victoria station and turned my head to the right, checking the road for traffic, and I just saw this photo. It’s turned out as I envisaged it, I think. It’s nice when that happens.
So, I see it’s a year ago today that I posted my 2,000th picture. In a couple of weeks it’ll be six-and-a-half years since I started this blog. But there are still little takes on the Uni of Manchester campus I haven’t tried yet. Even if they aren’t quite straight.
Making transport communal has always seemed to me to be the most sensible solution. I haven’t owned a car for some twelve years now, at least, but I am a member of a car pool. These orange bikes get unlocked by some code you can get on your mobile phone, you use them, leave them at your destination so someone else, possibly, can use them there. So simple. Unlike the similar ones I saw in Brisbane five years ago, these ones are seen to be used now and again. And yet there are some who would react even to this basic and friendly form of socialism by frothing at the mouth.
Richmond Street, Manchester. Overnight I have cogitated on a possible pithy commentary for this one and none springs to mind so let me allow the photo to stand on its own for a change…
Being 42 